SQL Server

Its the 80th T-SQL Tuesday and for some reason I decided to write a blog post. This month’s host is a good friend, Chris Yates and since its his birthday he decided to give us a gift by opening the topic to “anything”

I’ve worked with SQL Server in some form for longer than I care to admit so I thought it would be interesting to write down my memories of each release. Why? I dont know, I guess because I can and perhaps just perhaps to compare notes with a few other “old-timers”

SQL Releases over the years

SQL 6.5

a GUI on a DB? This was sheer madness

SQL Enterprise manager was revolutionary & light years ahead of the competition

Corruption, Corruption Corruption

I still miss ISQL_w sometimes (not really)

Shipped with actual printed books

SQL 7.0

Side by side unusable installs of SQL 6.5 and 7.0 during upgrades

I do miss the standalone Query Analyzer tool

DTS… oh the nightmares of DTS, they all start here

SQL 2000

Someone put XML in a database… AKA: Patient zero

You get a bigint and you get a bigint and you, bigints for everyone!

There was a disturbance in the force and SSRS appeared (Someone say it was SSAS that caused the disturbance but I disagree)

Put multiple instances of SQL on a server they said, it’ll be fun they said…… NOT

SQL 2005

SSIS appears, the lights suddenly dim and a clown jumps out of a box and says “Surprise”

Upgrade pain like no other “80” compatibility still haunts many-a-DBA

CLR is banished by DBA’s everywhere for being the devils magic and clearly evil

DTA appears and is quickly crowned with a dunce cap

SSNS came and went so quickly no one ever saw it

TSQL Window functions appear and developers rejoice!

BIDS shows up and BI developers lives are never the same

SQL 2008

PBM appears and quickly goes stale

Compression of all the things arrives but only if you spend mega bucks

DMV’s finally became useful

intellisense? what is this dark art that saves me from typing SLECT 1 more time

AlwaysOn, Alwayson, Always on, Who knows what it will be called today but the moniker appeared and Allan Hirt suddenly had more grey hair

This solution serves as an outstanding base but like anything else its can be useful to tweak things a bit. Extending the initial automation provided by his scripts is what this post is all about.

In particular, I’ve modified Ola’s scripts to generate the files needed to restore all of the databases that have been backed up with his solution. In particular, having the ability to easily restore the whole server in the case of a disaster. Though, you could easily pull out one DB to only restore it. This script is currently only written for litespeed since that’s what I use for backups. However, it could easily be changed to support native backups or any of the other backup products that Ola’s scripts can be configured for. Perhaps Ill work on those in the future if it would be useful.

The idea is that every time you take a backup the backup job will create a .sql file on the server filesystem in the backup directory that can be used to restore to the point of the backups that were just taken.

This solution includes three pieces, an additional stored procedure, an additional step in both of the backup jobs to execute that stored procedure and lastly a step in the cleanup procedure to remove the restore scripts from the filesystem that have aged.

A couple of notes of caution:

As with anything you find on the internet, please use at your own risk in a development/test system and proceed with caution.

This script makes several assumptions including

That you’ve installed Ola’s commands into the master database

That you’re using litespeed

That logging to the commandlog table is enabled

The stored procedure is relatively simple and accepts a single parameter @type “LOG” will generate the script as of the last log backup taken or for any other parameter, I happen to use “FULL”, it generates the script based on the last full backup.

To execute the stored procedure, this needs to be added as an additional cmdexec job step to the Full backup job (make sure to change the directory where you want the .sql files stored (H:\SERVERNAME below))

To execute the stored procedure, this needs to be added as an additional cmdexec job step to the Transaction log backup job (make sure to change the directory where you want the .sql files stored (H:\SERVERNAME below))

I have these steps scripted into Ola’s original solution .sql so the folder names are set properly and job creation is completely automated. Ill leave that part of extending automation to you, dear reader, as homework.

Since SQL Server 2005 we’ve been able to grant one login the ability to impersonate another in order to have a different set of effective permissions. More than a few times I’ve found this paradigm useful in order to solve problems while adhering to the principal of least privilege and likewise more than a few times I’ve tried to find information about who has impersonation privileges in SSMS and have been severely disappointed to find that it is buried. This extremely simple script solves that problem and gives all of the information about who has impersonation rights on an instance.

If you want to read more about all the fantastic things you can do with EXECUTE AS and impersonation, MSDN is a good place to start

A developer was trying to add a datasource and use “test connection” in the report manager web interface instead of BIDS which, incidentally worked. When they tried to save or test the data source, an error occurred “The permissions granted to user “Domain\User” are insufficient for performing this operation. (rsAccessDenied)” After much websearching and digging through verbose SSRS logs, SQL Traces, Windows Event logs, Process Monitor traces, etc. I had just about given up hope and turned to twitter to vent about the error. Luckily, Chris Testa-O’Neill , Doug Lane, and Tamera Clark came to my rescue and headed me down the right path of this being an SSRS catalog permission issue (Thanks again!)

Environment Details

SSRS 2008r2

Folder inheritance is broken and the developer account has Browser permissions on the root folder as well as Browser, Publisher and Report Builder permissions on the sub-folder. There are no system level permissions for the account.

The Problem

In the SSRS error log I found the following messages which are only slightly more helpful (Highlighted for influence)

I’ve spent many thousands of hours of my life serving the PASS organization and want the opportunity to spend a few hundred thousand more in the same role over the next two years. However, if by chance the community wants to see someone else in my seat on the board I can live with that, there aren’t any bad choices.

As much time and energy as I’ve put into PASS over the years this outcome stung a bit personally but I’ve come to accept the reality of it. Thanks to everyone who supported me in this election cycle, I was truly humbled to receive your support.

Congrats to JRJ, Sri and Wendy. I’m sure yall will do a great job keeping the organization moving forward on the right track.